I have noticed this nice little indicator-applet on the panel at the top of my Ubuntu screen, but I haven’t had much chance to use it. I found the specs for it here. By default, Skype and GMail don’t integrate into it, so I am looking for solutions. I thought I would look for GMail first:

The next hit I found was a little bit unusual. Psi is another chatting application, and in the psi-plus-plugins, there is a GMail checker. I found an interesting article describing the application and a link to configuring with GMail. Come to find out, Google has some instructions, too.

Gnome-Gmail-Notifier is another option. The Main Website has a little more information, but from the screenshots, it looks like it creates a system tray icon rather than using the indicator applet.

The Gmail-Notify program is a python/gtk option (not to be confused with the GMail-Notifier only available on Windows). It’s goal is to provide an alternative for Google’s Windows only program.

The next item is not really a notifier applet: prism-google-mail. It is actually a Prism application. This installs the GMail webapp listed in the bundles section.

CheckGmail is the next option. From what I can tell, it only looks like it works with a system tray icon.

desktop-webmail looks like an interesting tool even though it isn’t a notifier. The Gnome-GMail mentioned in the article looks like another thing to research although I didn’t see it in the repositories.

conduit is a tool that I had seen before. It is not a notifier, but a cool app nonetheless.

The thread mentions gm-notify as an option that uses the indicator applet. It is not in the repositories, but you can add it using Software Sources. Add “ppa:gm-notify-maintainers/ppa”. Then, you can install the package. Here is what it looks like:

My next step is to check out this article to try to integrate Skype into the mix. Before I upgraded, I had been using Cairo-Dock. My quick search didn’t show the indicator applet for it, but I did see an article about AWN supporting the indicator applet. I will have to put some more time into that.

We have been having trouble with the remote not being able to control the volume on our Mythbuntu installation. I just came across the pulseaudio-module-lirc package —

sudo apt-get install pulseaudio-module-lirc

My mute button didn’t work, so I tried adding the lirc configuration as explained in this thread. It didn’t work. The volume up and down did work though before I added that configuration. The only thing I didn’t like was that it didn’t show the visual volume display on the screen.

On a side note, I found another application that looked interesting from this post: gizmod. Actually, even though the post says they don’t have deb packages, I found one already in the repositories!

Another handy program is unclutter:

sudo apt-get install unclutter

It hides the mouse cursor so that you don’t see it in front of the videos you are watching. I found it here, and here is another post about it.

We found some of the old shows on Hulu, and we have really been enjoying them: Bewitched, Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart, etc. Since we don’t have cable, this works great for us. It’s like a new kind of TV!

On top of that, I found out that I could install the Hulu application on my MythTV box.

I ran across this tool a while ago, but I hadn’t had the opportunity to try it out. It is called dualscreen-mouse-utils, and the thing that I want to use it for is to create a way to switch between my monitors with a remote control button. Here are some links to start with:

I chose to install sbackup, but it didn’t work so hot for me. It kicked off the process to start backing up, and I liked the interface the way I could choose what I wanted backed up. But, what I didn’t like is that the process ran in the background, and I couldn’t see any status of the backup or confirm that it was running. I thought for sure that I chose the destination as my external drive, but it began backing up to /var/backup instead, and it filled up my drive.

Once I found and deleted that backup, I ended up just using a GUI front-end to rsync. I think it was the grsync one. If you do a search for “rsync” in synaptic, you will see a number of options.